NDC tried to salvage votes with ‘Dubai’ interchange – Teye Nyaunu

A former National Democratic Congress (NDC) MP, Teye Nayunu let loose on some elements within the party for, among other things, sidelining the Jerry John Rawlings during the 2016 campaign.

Among other things, leaving Mr. Rawlings off the campaign team was an “expensive experiment and it cost us,” he stated on Eyewitness News.

It was for reasons like this that Mr. Teye Nyaunu said “we all saw defeat coming” during the elections that saw the NDC Flagbearer and sitting President, John Mahama, suffer the worst election defeat in Ghana’s democratic history.

Singling out the Greater Accra Region, he said defeat was inevitable and the NDC made a last ditch attempt to salvage the region with the 74 million euro Kwame Nkrumah Interchange, which was inaugurated in November 2016, three weeks to the December 2016 polls.

“All of us knew that we had lost Greater Accra. We saw it in advance and we were trying to use the overhead at the Kwame Nkrumah Circle to galvanize the people.”

He also cited a failure of leadership as contributing to the defeat saying, “… I saw the defeat coming when I saw we had lost the leadership. When I saw that everybody was doing what they liked, what even Stan Dogbe and the rest were doing at the Flagstaff House.”

We can’t blame Rawlings for defeat

Mr. Teye Nyaunu comments followed an article authored by former Deputy Chief of Staff, Dr. Valarie Sawyerr who slammed Jerry Rawlings’ criticisms of the NDC, even opposition, as needy and controlling.

She also held that Rawlings contributed to the NDC’s election defeat with his criticism of the party.

But Mr. Teye Nyaunu said it would be illogical to blame someone not deemed important to even help the campaign.

“If he is nobody like we all claimed from the beginning, that we can win minus him, why then turn around and begin to blame him? We said he is nobody and so we rejected him during the campaign and he was sitting in his office and in his house and we went to the polls and we were humiliated.”